John Buell

Immigrants as Threats?

Sometimes email brings startling surprises. Recently I wrote on
threats to water resources posed by privatization and commercial
bottled water (4/15/06 TPP). I expected notes defending private
ownership of water rights or bottled water.

Instead, one respondent commented: "As with almost all stories
about wages falling, overpopulation, increases in gang activity and
diminishing resources, we never see the actual cause identified --
immigration. Had we stuck to a reasonable policy of only allowing in
about 100,000 persons a year, we would now only have about 250
million people. Nowhere does it say in the US constitution that if
the Philippines, Mexico, China or India do not treat their citizens
well we will take them in. Of course, even King George realizes that
by increasing the labor supply, wages go down while unemployment
skyrockets."

Immigrants have become the hot-button issue of our time, perhaps
superseding or becoming absorbed into the war on terrorism. There
are, however, risks in this step. The contribution that mainstream
values and practices make to our most pressing problems and even to
the high rate of immigration itself can be lost in this rhetorical
escalation.

Some environmentalists argue that immigrants unduly tax planetary
resources. With their high birth rates, large numbers will soon be
consuming resources at the obscene US rate. In an increasingly global
economy, however, resource consumption depends on far more than
location. Corporate globalization brings modern western technologies
and consumer preferences to the rest of the world. World air
pollution and world demand for a range of scarce commodities are
heavily driven by economic expansion in China and India. Mexico City
is itself a primer on traffic congestion and air pollution. Just as
broadly, US and European experience suggest that as immigrants
achieve relative economic security, birth rates slow.

Why do they come in the first place? When Americans aren't worried
that "they hate us for what we are, not for what we do," they become
equally convinced that everyone wants to live here. Yet the Mexican
press has amply demonstrated that many Mexicans regard work in the
United States as only a last hope to keep their families alive. They
intend to return home as soon as possible. One of the paradoxes of
harsh border policies is that many end up spending longer in this
country than they had planned.

The most rapid increases in immigration have occurred only within
the last few years. There were just 2.5 million undocumented
immigrants in the United States in 1995. 8 million have arrived
since. NAFTA plays a major role in this forced exodus. As economist
Jeff Faux points out, the Mexican government had long sustained
subsistence agriculture through price supports on corn and beans.

NAFTA eliminated these subsidies and hypocritically insisted on
opening Mexican agriculture to competition with subsidized US
agribusiness. Two million Mexican farmers were driven from their land
to the growing urban centers. Thirty years ago, Mexican wages were
23% of US wages; by 2002 they had sunk to a mere 12%.

What role did Mexican peasants and factory workers have in these
changes? Throughout much of the twentieth century, Mexico was ruled
by a corrupt one-party system, often with the connivance and
assistance of the United States. Had NAFTA been subject to a free and
fair referendum in Mexico, it would surely have lost.

Yet if immigration and wage decline can be traced in part to US
trade treaties, domestic policy should not be neglected.
Working-class wage stagnation began a quarter-century ago. In an
effort to curb late-seventies inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman
Paul Volker pushed interest rates to crushing levels and brought the
economy to a halt. Ronald Reagan began a long series of attacks on
unions. Unemployment, weakening unions and a withering safety net
soon traumatized many American workers.

Trauma provides fertile soil for an anti-immigrant backlash. Yet
getting off the global economy -- either through protectionism or
walling off Mexico -- may be no answer. Many production processes are
now globalized, and labor in the developing world also deserves
justice. Trade treaties that protect wage and organizing rights
everywhere are the best answer to the corporate globalization that
impels rapid population shifts. Here at home, giving all workers,
documented or not, full labor rights is the best way to protect
domestic labor. If the undocumented immigrants who pick our fruit and
clean our resorts are paid a living wage, they will in turn buy other
goods and services, thereby expanding the pool of good jobs for all.
Just as fundamentally, such policies lay the foundation for
transnational cooperation to reform trade treaties.

Such an agenda may strike some as utopian. We are far from
adopting such a course. Yet expelling undocumented workers and
forcing employers to accept real sanctions is both cruel and even
more implausible. Earlier generations of immigrants have given us not
only hard work but cultural and political vitality. I will stake my
gamble on attempts to build new progressive political alliances.

John Buell (jbuell@acadia.net) is a columnist for the Bangor
Daily News in Maine.